why listening to this music is interesting, important, and maybe even fun. #robertgable #since2003

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /meet the music/

Meet the Music is a website devoted to introducing specific classical works that will be frequently played this year in the US -- it's mostly traditional composers so far although Elena Park has a short essay on Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Greg Sandow, the impetus for the site, writes on John Adam's Violin Concerto and how Adams sought an alternative to the concerto convention of soloist/orchestra dialogue. Quoting Sandow quoting the composer:

So he came up with the idea of the violin playing nearly all the time.
Or, as he put it (if I may repeat the wonderful thought from him I
quoted at the start of this): “The orchestra [is] the organized,
delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues, and bones; the violin
[is] the dream that flows through it.”

By the way, although I vaguely remembered Greg Sandow mentioning the Meet the Music concept on his blog, I found the site today in a roundabout way. Checking aworks referrers, I found this site, which takes the aworks rss feed and publishes the first fifty words of each post (albeit with a link to my original post). Then, the site throws up Google ads (generating revenue for that site). Ignoring the money aspect, two things from those ads got my attention in the context of aworks: one, the ad for Meet the Music which was the first I had heard of the actual site and two, that the rest of the ads were all symphonic orchestra links either for tickets or recordings (Pacific, Prague, BBC, Alaska). Would I be doing the community a public service by signing up aworks for Google AdSense? Would I be endorsing an institution, the orchestra, that isn't particularly meaningful to me right now? Is it ironic if I were to engage in commerce solely motivated by the public good?

For the record, whether or not I try Google Ads, I'll reiterate my Amazon associate
status, where if someone clicks on an Amazon-supplied graphic or link on
aworks and actually purchases something, I would, in theory, get a small cut. I also found this site which uses the aworks feed, under the banner of music headlines (scroll down to see my somewhat stale content although without ads). Finally, LiveJournal has apparently automatically created a new shadow user, aworks, presumably to make it easy for LiveJournal users to subscribe to the feed. I'm all in favor of that although it looks strange to see my full content wrapped in LJ graphics and I don't know what to do if someone posts a comment there instead of here.